23. Courtney
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Courtney
Ibrought up Little Sprouts again on a Sunday, almost eight months to the day since I'd first toured it alone, and asked Ryan if he wanted to come with me for the real visit this time, the one that would actually decide something.
"Yes," he said, so immediately that I almost laughed. "Yes, absolutely. What time?"
We went together on a Tuesday morning, both of us taking off work for it, and I watched him ask thoughtful questions about the infant program, about the sibling discount structure, about pickup logistics in a way that made clear he'd actually been thinking about this, not just showing up to perform interest. We disagreed, briefly, about the after-school extension program, him wanting more structured activity time, me preferring the more open, child-led afternoon block, and worked through it together in the parking lot afterward, weighing the actual pros and cons out loud without either of us needing an outside opinion to settle it.
"I think the open block is right for her, actually," Ryan said, after I laid out my reasoning. "I was picturing the structured stuff because that's what I would have wanted at her age, but she's not me. She'd probably rather have unscheduled time to run her own little empire."
"She would absolutely rather run her own empire."
"Open block it is." He smiled, easy, and something in the ordinariness of it, two parents actually deciding something together, hit me harder than I expected it to.
We submitted the application together that same week, filled out the forms side by side at my parents' kitchen table, and somewhere in the middle of listing emergency contacts and allergy information, the conversation drifted naturally toward Baby Two, toward the infant room we'd have to plan around eventually, toward futures we hadn't discussed together in months.
"I should tell you something," I said, setting my pen down. "I started birth control again. Right after I left."
Something crossed his face, quick, complicated, and I watched him carefully. "I know."
"You know?"
"I saw the prescription. That day at the park. It slipped out of your bag." He said it gently, no accusation in it. "I never said anything. It wasn't my place to bring it up in that moment."
I felt a flush of something uncomfortable, being seen in a moment I hadn't chosen to reveal. "What did you do with that? Knowing that?"
"Nothing, at first. I just sat with it, alone, for a long time.
And then I understood something I hadn't let myself understand yet.
" He held my eyes, steady. "You weren't punishing me with it.
You were protecting yourself, because some part of you had stopped believing our future was something safe to plan around.
That did more to make me understand what I'd actually broken than any conversation we'd had up to that point.
I never told anyone. Not Michelle, not Kate, not Tom.
I just sat with it, because it belonged to you, and it wasn't mine to hand to someone else to help me process. "
Something in me, hearing that, ached and settled at once. "Thank you for telling me. And for not making it into an accusation."
"It wasn't my place to be angry about it.
You did exactly what you needed to do to protect yourself from a man who hadn't earned your trust yet.
" He reached across the table, not quite touching my hand, leaving the choice to close the distance to me.
"Baby Two's still an if, right now. I want you to know that's okay.
Whatever timeline makes sense for you is the only timeline that matters. "
"It's still an if," I agreed, and let my hand close over his, the first time I'd initiated the contact in months.
The weeks that followed built something I didn't have a name for yet, not quite dating, not quite marriage, some suspended, hopeful middle state that felt both fragile and increasingly solid.
We had dinner together most weeks, sometimes just the two of us while my mother watched Melody, sometimes all three of us at the house that still had half his things in it and half mine slowly migrating back.
He lingered after these dinners longer than logistics required. I found myself wanting him to.
One of those dinners turned into something I hadn't expected, a full evening at the house, Melody insisting on cooking "her way," which meant supervising both of us with a wooden spoon while we actually made the pasta, narrating our progress like a tiny, opinionated chef on a cooking show.
Ryan played along with total commitment, asking her serious questions about seasoning that she answered with complete, invented authority, and I stood at the counter watching the two of them, laughing so hard at one point that I had to set down the knife I was using.
"You're going to cut yourself if you keep laughing at my sous chef," Ryan said, grinning at me over Melody's head.
"Your sous chef just told you oregano goes in ice cream."
"Sometimes it does," Melody said, with such total confidence that neither of us had the heart to argue, and we ate a completely ordinary, slightly over-oreganoed dinner together at the table where we'd eaten a thousand ordinary dinners before, and it felt, for the first time in months, like something close to whole.
Kate came by one Sunday while Ryan and Melody were at the house, and found me there too, helping sort through a box of Melody's outgrown clothes.
She didn't say much about the reconciliation-in-progress directly, but she hugged me longer than usual on her way out, and said, quietly, "I'm glad you're both still trying.
He's better for it. I can see it already.
" It wasn't much, but it mattered, hearing it from the one person who'd known Ryan longest and had never once pretended his flaws weren't real.
We disagreed again, a smaller thing this time, over whether to keep Melody's current bedtime routine once she started at the new center in the fall or shift it earlier given the change in schedule, and worked it out over coffee one morning without either of us needing to escalate it into anything bigger than it was.
It was such an ordinary disagreement, the kind married people had constantly, that having it again, easily, without any of the old weight underneath it, felt like its own quiet kind of proof.
My father caught me alone in the garage one Saturday, helping him look for a socket wrench he swore he'd left there and hadn't, and asked, in his careful, sideways way, how things were actually going.
"Good," I said. "Really good, honestly. We're taking it slow, but it's good."
"He seems different. I've noticed it too, not just your mother." He found the wrench, finally, wedged behind a paint can, and held it up like a small victory. "I said some things back in the spring I probably shouldn't have. About whether this was more than it needed to be."
"I remember."
"I want you to know I don't feel that way anymore.
Watching him with Melody, watching how he talks to you now, that's not a man performing for an audience.
That's a man who actually changed." He set the wrench down and looked at me directly, something unusually open in his expression for a man who mostly communicated through gestures and half sentences.
"I'm glad I was wrong to worry the way I did. I hope you know that."
"That means a lot, Dad. More than you probably realize."
"Good." He cleared his throat, already retreating from the moment's sincerity the way he always did once he'd said his piece, and handed me the wrench to carry inside. "Now go tell your mother I found this before she starts a whole investigation."
I laughed, and carried the wrench inside, and felt something settle further into place that had nothing to do with the tool itself and everything to do with watching my father's quiet skepticism finally, fully give way.
The kiss happened on one of those lingering nights, in the driveway of my parents' house, both of us saying goodnight in the particular drawn-out way of two people who didn't actually want the night to end.
He didn't reach for me first. I closed the distance, some old, familiar pull overriding the careful caution I'd maintained for months, and the kiss, when it happened, was slow and searching and achingly familiar, his hand coming up to my jaw the exact way it always had, like his body remembered this even faster than either of our minds had caught up.
I pulled back first, breathing unsteady, and he let me, immediately, no protest in it.
"I don't want this deciding anything," I said. "I don't want to wake up tomorrow having let my body make a decision my head hasn't actually finished making."
"Okay." He said it simply, no hurt in it, no attempt to argue me out of the boundary. "That's completely fair. I'm not going anywhere."
We stood there a moment longer, foreheads nearly touching, both of us breathing the same charged, hopeful air, before I stepped back fully and said goodnight, and he didn't push, didn't sulk, didn't try to extract more than I was ready to give.
I told Jenna about the kiss over lunch that week, half expecting some version of caution, given how closely she'd tracked the whole ordeal from the beginning, but she just grinned and stole a fry off my tray, unbothered.
"About time," she said. "I was starting to think you two were going to circle each other in careful, wounded orbits forever."
"I don't want to rush it just because it feels good right now. I still remember exactly how much it cost to get here."
"I know you do. That's exactly why I'm not worried about you rushing it.
" She considered me for a second, more serious now.
"You've been careful this whole time, Courtney.
Careful to the point of almost punishing yourself for wanting something good again.
I think you're allowed to actually let this feel good without treating every bit of hope like a trap. "
"When did you get so wise?"
"I've always been this wise. You've just been too busy having a crisis to notice.
" She bumped my shoulder, easy and warm.
"For what it's worth, I've watched him show up for months now.
Consistently. Not performing it for an audience, just doing it, over and over, when nobody but you was watching closely enough to notice.
" She squeezed my shoulder. "Whatever you decide, I trust you to know your own marriage better than I do. "
"I think I believe it's real too. I'm just scared of being wrong about that again."
"You won't know unless you let yourself find out.
And if it does go sideways somehow, you've survived worse, and you'll survive that too.
But I don't think it's going to." She said it with a conviction I leaned on more than I expected to, grateful, as I had been so many times that year, for a friend who'd tell me the honest thing instead of just the comfortable one.
It was Little Sprouts that finally forced the actual question.
The acceptance email came on a Thursday, a spot confirmed for the fall, and reading it in my parents' kitchen, I laughed out loud at the sheer, practical absurdity of our situation: two people who'd just jointly enrolled their daughter in a new daycare, who discussed Baby Two like it was a real, planned future, who kissed goodnight in driveways like teenagers, and who were still, on paper, living in two separate houses because neither of us had said the actual words out loud yet.
I called Ryan that night.
"I want to talk about coming home," I said, before I could talk myself out of the directness of it.
The silence on the other end lasted just long enough that I heard him catch his breath before he answered. "Yeah. I'd like that. Whenever you're ready to actually have that conversation, I'm ready to have it with you."
"Soon," I said. "I think I'm ready soon."
"I'll be here," he said, and for the first time in a very long time, I believed, completely, that he meant it.